


Infinitesimal

by catty_the_spy



Category: Annihilation (2018 Garland)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, canon typical everything?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-24 22:11:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20021845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catty_the_spy/pseuds/catty_the_spy
Summary: Kane enters the lighthouse, and becomes (nothing) everything.





	Infinitesimal

**Author's Note:**

> “A quantity less than any finite quantity yet not zero” seems fitting, right? Considering the way everything is broken up and bounced around in The Shimmer. I love creepy mind-fucky movies.

  
When Kane emerged, he laughed and laughed and laughed and cried, like his world was ending, like it already had.

“Of course,” he said, one of them said. “Of course.”

They slept curled up like children, facing each other. Twins.

There is no outside here, but there is Lena.

He remembers them laughing. They don’t laugh. They sit together for blood draws and skin samples and hold hands. They don’t talk.

There are questions - who or what is real - but no answers.

Where did you get this tattoo? Where were you born? How old are you? Have you ever had any teeth pulled? What is your middle name?

They don’t talk.

There is no forwards or backwards. Only this, circling the lighthouse. Orbiting. One of them is a shapeshifter. The other is shiftless. They take turns. One laughs, the other cries. One stares at the sand in front of his face, hardly breathing. One can’t stop moving, tearing at his own flesh when the landscape resists.

One wants to die. The other wants to go home.

Maybe they have gone through this cycle five times, a thousand times.

Maybe an infinity of Kanes has come through the door and shattered.

They can’t stay here. Eventually the refracted image will lose definition, broken down into primary components and then into nothing. Into everything. Unending.

Kane speaks, but he can’t remember his own voice.

“We can’t stay here,” Lena says. To him or to the questioners. It isn’t clear.

“Why?” he asks. He thinks he asks. Maybe this is a reflection, repeating infinitely until it becomes nothing. Everything.

“We need a real enclosure,” Lena says. It feels like an echo. “We need stimulation. We can’t thrive under these conditions. We can’t live like this. _I_ can’t live like this.”

“I can’t live like this,” he says. Mirroring.

Kane fragments and recombines and fragments and recombines.

They look at each other. One of them is barely holding together. One of them is falling apart. They aren’t human. Maybe they never have been.

One of them peels off layers of flesh in sheets. There is no blood, only different bodies underneath.

“Which one of us came first?” he asks.

“I can’t tell,” he says.

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Am I real?” they ask, but reflections can’t answer.

Kane says “Lena was real.”

Kane says “Lena is real.”

Kane agrees.

The bed is small, but he and Lena sleep in it together, tangled up like children. Time doesn’t exist here. There is no sun or schedule to track, and the questioners do not allow such a thing to morph into being.

Maybe there could be words between them. Maybe there are, transferred skin to skin. Maybe there’s something there, in the air that bounces back between them. Something passes between them, but it isn’t sound.

Questions belong to others, like the sun. Answers don’t exist.

They don’t talk.

**Author's Note:**

> I almost named this fic Disassociation, because it feels a lot like that. I also have no idea what to tag this with?


End file.
